How New Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash Releases Put a Different Spin on Two Classic Voices

They’ve both been gone for decades, and yet it’s still possible to hear two Country Music Hall of Fame members who started at Sun Records, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, in new ways.

Presley is the subject of Memphis (due Aug. 9 from RCA/Legacy), a 111-track, five-disc box set that mines recordings from five different locations in his adopted hometown: the Sun Recording Studio, the American Studios, the Stax Studio, the Mid-South Coliseum and Graceland Mansion’s Jungle Room. On three of the studio discs, previously released tracks are remixed strictly using the instrumentation from the core tracking session, leaving out material that was overdubbed at a later date.

“By not having the additional strings and backing vocals, there [is] an intimacy to it that would reveal things that we hadn’t heard before,” says Memphis producer Ernst Jorgensen, a well-established Presley authority. “So songs come out with a different feel to them.”

The Presley package arrives with the 70th anniversary of his seminal recording of “That’s All Right,” the single that launched his career. 

Coincidentally, Cash’s 11-track Songwriter (released June 28 by Mercury Nashville/Universal Music Enterprises) includes the similarly titled “Well Alright” — a previously unreleased, 30-year-old song that echoes the spacious, simplistic sound that characterized his own Sun recordings. John Carter Cash produced the album with David Ferguson, isolating the Man in Black’s vocals from a series of 1993 recordings and reframing them with new arrangements.

“I always wanted to know what would happen if it went down to the bare essence of the correct, simple picture behind my father,” John Carter said during a media listening event earlier this year. It’s “the right instrumentation, the sound of Johnny Cash supported by people who had played with him, mostly.”

It’s no secret that record labels are able to bolster their bottom lines by repackaging and/or reimagining catalog material from their best-selling artists, though after creating multiple retro releases of classic artists, it becomes increasingly difficult to find fresh ways to celebrate them. The new Presley and Cash releases succeed in representing multiple facets of each performer’s career. Memphis captures Presley in his early rockabilly stage, explores his “Suspicious Minds” comeback era and wraps with the massive productions that marked his live shows and studio efforts in his final, mid-’70s years. 

Songwriter, while drawing on Cash cuts from 1993, points to different eras in his own evolution. “Well Alright,” by adapting “boom-chick” production to a story about meeting a woman in a laundromat, has elements of his 1957 hit “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” “I Love You Tonite” reflects on his relationship with June Carter Cash while employing an appropriate country-ballad posture. “Hello Out There” — written after the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft — takes a spiritual view of the universe’s expanse, much like his “I fly a starship” verse in “Highwayman.” And the tremolo-enhanced “Spotlight,” with a bluesy guitar solo by Dan Auerbach,fits neatly into the Americana genre that coalesced during Cash’s latter years.

“Dad saw no limits, and he said, ‘Always follow your heart,’ ” John Carter recalled. “So that’s what we did.”

Working with catalogs of such cultural heft as Presley and Cash is not for the faint of heart. “It’s very nerve-wracking,” says Memphis-based engineer Matt Ross-Spang, who remixed Memphis.

With the Cash material, the job was to enhance unfamiliar songs with musical settings that felt appropriate to his artistic sensibilities. With Presley, the assignment involved treating familiar performances — including a number of classics — with reverence, even while revising them. “You want to make it better, but you also don’t want to take it out of the realm of how we’ve all heard it and loved it all these decades,” Ross-Spang says. “I tried to really be true to the original. I tried to be true to the musicians’ and the producers’ direction.”

In the new remix of “Kentucky Rain,” sans the background chorus and horn section, Hammond B-3 stabs become suddenly evident. And on Presley’s underappreciated “My Boy,” Ronnie Tutt’s drum fills take on extra importance. In some ways, it sets up the sound of the live disc, where Tutt is a driving force.

“In a wonderful way, he’s overplaying,” Ross-Spang observes. “Every hip shake from Elvis, every scarf throw, every look or hand throw Elvis does, Ronnie’s doing an amazing drum fill. All the songs are going 90 miles an hour, and Ronnie’s leading the charge. It’s incredible. A big reason why those live shows were so exciting was Ronnie Tutt’s drums.”

Considered in tandem, Presley’s Memphis and Cash’s Songwriter hint at interesting parallels between both artists. They each played a role in the development of rockabilly while they were Sun labelmates in the 1950s. And both employed large concert ensembles during the 1970s — Presley stacked two backing vocal groups atop a large-size live band; Cash similarly performed on his ABC-TV show in the early 1970s with his band expanded by two supporting vocal groups (The Carter Family and The Statler Brothers), plus a sizable orchestra. 

Cash eventually returned to a simpler sound with his Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, beginning just months after he recorded the vocals that appear on Songwriter. Since Presley died at age 42, how he would have approached his senior recording years remains a mystery. But the two packages provide a reminder of how two significant 20th-century voices drew on small-town roots music to help shape the arc of modern country.

“They had great determination to go along with the melting pot of music that they came from,” Jorgensen notes. “Any kind of music — if you came from Arkansas, or Mississippi or Louisiana — was available to you. You couldn’t say the same about a lot of city environments.” 

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Written by Mr. Nimbus